Category: Uncategorized

Instead of Writing

i.
Instead of writing
I could take a nap
Stare out the window.
Download a productivity app so I can waste more time tracking my time.
I could start a new project
Or stare at an unfinished one
like the wall that needs a final coat of paint
Or finish the front door repair, do the detail work.
I already walked the dog…

Instead of writing
I could unload the dishwasher or use the new vacuum
Check my social media accounts.
Masturbate.
Do a load of laundry
Research trips to Costa Rica.
Conduct an image search on the pantsuit my daughter wants for prom
Start dinner even though it’s 10 am.
Text someone I should not.
Get a flu shot
Run an errand.
Brush the cat
Talk to the dog.
Meditate
Cry
Eat
Read.
Pluck the chin hairs the laser missed
Clean up my eyebrows and then sit on my hands so I don’t pick at my fingers.

ii.
Instead of writing
I could thank the guy on Instagram for answering my question about the vase he posted a photo of this morning. I could let him know that, ‘Yeah, I do want the signed and numbered, open-top Scandinavian Kosta Boda vase.’

And if I had any doubts about buying it, I really should get it because out of the 17 or so pieces, my eye went to this vessel. Because of course it did. It looks like a skyscraper. And it is, the artist named the work, “Metropolis.”

I’m not surprised that among the Blenko, Murano and Millefiori glass, I like the chunky, blocky one. I feel nothing for the red, hand-blown piece with the neck of a swan and a Georgia O’Keefe opening; I am immune to the brown bowl, that despite its thickness, is somehow still transparent; nor am I moved by the thin, green vase flecked with red, its edges fluted, like seaweed lettuce washed up on the shore.

iii.
The vase is a sign. Today marks the two-year anniversary of the day my father and I met for the first time. He lives in the city, the only city, New York City. I knew he did before I knew him, before I knew who he was. I felt it in my bones.

The City, much like the vase, with its determined lines and straightforward approach, draws me in, pulls me toward it with purpose; with the force of an unseen magnet.

Like the pull of a nothing-special bar on West 63rd I’d sometimes frequent when I was in the City for work. There are 18-thousand bars in Manhattan and some of them are pretty amazing. This particular bar was not.

Yet it was. I didn’t know it at the time, but this bland and basic bar with only blended scotch, no single malts, was attached to the building my father lived in. Still lives in.

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The Glow

Remember when the house was new to us still?
When we returned our final offer on our first home, I had wanted the thrill of a deal.
To ask for something more exciting,
more mogul than a 12-month home warranty.
So I asked that the garden ornaments convey.
All of them.
Never mind I liked none of them.

Remember when the yard was unfamiliar to us still?
You stood tall and young, looking out the window filled with night
Your hands in the kitchen sink.
I saw you look twice.

Eyes big, you waved your hand and called me over.
(How I loved it when you said my name.)
Pointing, ‘Do you see it? That glowing, do you see it?’
I did. I saw it. But had no idea what it was.
A small spaceship? The eyes of an animal? A piece of the moon?

I didn’t venture out alone to investigate
Or send you into the dark by yourself
Nor mumble, ‘It’s probably nothing.’

We went outside together,
Tip-toeing around the catawpa tree, its limbs so low you had to duck.
Closer now, giggling.
‘You go.’
‘No, you go.’
‘I’m not going. You go.’

We approached the glow together, an army of two.
You nudged it with the tip of your shoe.
Nothing, no movement.
I bent down and poked the mystery on the ground.

‘Oh my god,’ I said, no more whispering.
The glow was from an extension cord set outside to power the small lily pond,
it’s illuminated end, once hidden under the mulch, now exposed.

The glow was nothing we expected it to be. Like so many things that would come to the surface.
Glowing multi-plug extension cord

Nine Days of Vinegar

Is the sting of me
The buzz of me
The me of me gone?
Have I worn off?

I’m not sure why, but I keep thinking of vinegar when I think of you.
Maybe because I started a batch of drinking vinegar a week ago.
The jar on my counter
vinegar and raspberries, blueberries and blackberries.

At first, the concoction the color of a dehydrated person’s piss.
Seven days later, a deep ruby red
the berries degrading, becoming something different than how they began.
Two elements, graced by time and science, combining
to make something unexpected, good and palatable.

Or is vinegar on my mind because I busied myself with a how-to-make kombucha workshop this past week?
I wanted to tell you about it.
I would have told you about it
and how my friend and I misbehaved the entire class, how we laughed at the questions the men asked, the two of them so earnest, their wives so pleased.

I would have told you how I went back to the hardware store and had them recut the glass for the front door.
How I got two panes just in case I broke the first when I tried to place it back in the frame.
I would have said to, ‘standby for pictures,’ of the completed repair, of my sloppy solo work.

I would have told you I read at an open mic, my first.
I recited the poems I wrote about you, about us.
When I read the last line of the last one I sent you, some people in the audience inhaled. Some said, ‘damnnn.’
I wanted to invite you and told my friend as much.
She said, ‘Not yet, not this time. It’s too soon.’

Too soon for what? For me to miss you less? For my love to fade?

What day is that, when it’s not ‘too soon?’ One week and two days since we backed off and away, that day feels like an eighth day the Almighty forgot to create.

It’s been nine days of vinegar. Nights you kept me awake.

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Things I wish someone had told me

Sticking with the 500-words a day, here’s a list in no certain order of things I wish someone had either told me or I had figured out on my own earlier than I did. These ‘things’ may well not apply to all!

1. Store tubes of toothpaste and icy-hot, pain-relief ointments away from one another in the medicine cabinet. The latter does not make for a pleasant brushing experience.

2. Dogs do not appreciate nor respond well to being the subject of an experimental, ‘Let’s see what happens if I make them kiss.’

3. Getting drunk at the circus is a bad idea.

4. If someone you’re meeting for the first time has a scratchy, gravelly voice, don’t assume they have a cold or have been screaming ‘PULL,’ while shooting skeet all day. It could be that their unique vocals are the spoils of surviving throat cancer.

5. Children are not stupid. They know the difference between a back massager and a vibrator from an early age.

6. Do not approach or attempt to move a cat without first providing it some sort of visible warning or alert.

7. Your gut is your true north star. It does not lie and should not be ignored. When you have no one to ask, trust your gut. It will guide you. (Doesn’t mean you’ll like what you hear.)

8. Everyone is as insecure as you are.

9. Not everyone likes dogs.

10. Seminal fluid in the eye stings. It is mother nature’s pepper spray.

11. Pass on gerbils as pets, especially the white ones. The day will come and you won’t know when, but the gerbils who have lived in peace in your kids room for years will have a death-to-the-end cage match. Your child will forever be haunted by images of bloody gerbils that look like Stephen King’s, ‘Carrie’ onstage at the prom.

12. Don’t lend money to a model, no matter how good looking they are or how pretty they say you are.

13. Sometimes that dish of potpourri is just that, an eye-catching assortment of miscellaneous forest and woodpile gatherings, not a fragrant snack mix.

14. You can drive on ‘E’ longer than you probably think you can (but shouldn’t).

15. Not all bowls of mashed potatoes are what they seem. Sometimes they are mashed turnips.

16. When contemplating marriage or any long-term commitment with a partner, ask yourself if you could tolerate their most annoying habit x 500. If you can honestly answer, ‘Yes,’ proceed. If not, well…

17. Pick up your dry cleaning in a timely manner. They do not mess around and will give your things away whether it’s silk or not.

18. Don’t worry so much. Breathe and check for perspective before you freak out or lose faith. This applies to what others think – chances are they’re not thinking about you anyway.

19. Orange tabby cats look a lot a like. If yours goes missing, be sure the one you find is really yours. They are a wiley, needy bunch.

20. No one completes you but you.

21. There are no such things as comfortable shoes at an all-day trade show in Las Vegas.

22. When you flip off someone behind their back, make sure they are not facing a reflective surface.

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This cat (Sir Victor, rest his soul) looks like 25 other tabby cats.

The Baldest Hour of Want o’Clock

I want to write all the things for you
Search for all the songs
Carefully mine all the lyrics
All the verses
All the passages.
Package them, deliver them all at once
Trot them out once a day
For all the days.

I want to stop stealing what is not mine
Accumulating you piece by piece
Adding to a stockpile that doesn’t grow.
Each day at the baldest hour of want o’clock, the grains slip.
A sieve, the finest holes through the ventricles all the way to China.
A carpenter ant through my belly
Around the stalactites that intersect my breastplate
Around the bunion on my right foot out the tips of my toes.

I want to bury all the hatchets
Mend all the holes
Remove all the blinds
Dust all the shelves with only my bare hands.
Finish off the cornichons and toss all the olives
Stacked, treading oil in the jar
Trapped in an underwater chicken fight.

I want to add not subtract
Yet I most definitely do not want to divide.
Canned beef stew an actor’s fake vomit sprayed over the walls
A dog’s breakfast that you can’t eat but are served for years
seated in a folding chair at a folding table, the surface covered in spots of paint
Splatters of pink white blue yellow
Red
Memories so pure and true and good
You’d eat the folding table you really would –
Screw by screw nut by nut
Each plastic-coated aluminum leg including the hinges –
If each swallow would erase every lapse.

That’s not how it works.
At least not from where I sit
In a wooden chair at the laminate-topped table that I got to keep.

It’s not possible to nibble around the good times
and gobble swill smoke and chew the rest.
Something’s got to give and it’s me
I’ve got to go.

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Cookie-colored lenses

Yesterday I was so hungry I almost mistook a makeup sponge for a cookie. 

Yesterday I was so hungry I almost mistook a makeup sponge for a cookie. 

It was noon and I’d stayed out and up late the night before. Breakfast was long gone and I woke with a grumbling stomach. Coffee in bed – prepared and delivered not by me but FOR me – was divine and a fabulous way to start the last day of the year. As I accepted the extended mug, I contained my zeal but admit I did let an, ‘Oh my god,’ slip out, because coffee in bed is like a sixth lost love language.

(This is post one of a 31-day, 500-word writing challenge. In the span of publicly declaring on Facebook my commitment to the challenge and writing the above single line and paragraph, I have committed the following acts of procrastination: 

  1. Ran a word count. 96.
  2. Lit incense that I’ve not burnt in more than a year
  3. Put on a winter hat because it’s like a blanket for my head)

The coffee and company was great and although I bragged I wasn’t hungry, I needed to head home and get some food. And more coffee.

I usually avoid fast-food, but I was starving. Drive-through dark roast and what the hell, I won’t lie, a reheated bacon gouda hard roll went down easy but did not satiate. Was it ever there? Because suddenly it was gone. Maybe I’d eaten only half of it. I checked the paper bag.

But wait! What is this little delight I see peeking out from beneath my driving leg? A little gingerbread cookie? Isn’t that just the most darling thing ever. I’ve never known Starbucks to hand out free cookies. That barista must have had the holiday spirit too and felt my vibe back at her through the drive-up window and did a little pay-it-forward move, slipping a cute spicy molasses goodie in my bag. That book, ‘The Secret,’ was right – everything I need and want is here for the taking. So yeah, I’m gonna put you in my belly you bonus, surprise cookie.  Continue reading “Cookie-colored lenses”

Bathtime

Mr. Bubble paper box, soggy on the bottom
Die-cut spout like the box of baking soda in the kitchen.
Sparkly afros floating atop the bath water.
Extra bubbles, a treat that require work.

Tan, hairy forearm, the stretchy wristband of his Timex.
One shirt-sleeve rolled up,
On one knee in front of the tub.

Thinning salt-and-pepper hair oily with Vitalis
Rows raked that morning with the teeth of a black plastic comb
still visible.

Roughing up the water that gushed from the spigot
It was Niagra Falls then.

Agitating only the surface, no need to go deeper.
The sparkling mirrors inside the other sparking mirrors born from the flakes
The frothy cells winked, this is where the fairies lived.
God’s beard adrift in the bathtub.

Misc:

Too many bubble baths in succession make you itch
In places you shouldn’t scratch in public.

Experiments to determine if a big toe could become stuck in the faucet proved inconclusive.

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Sometimes, it’s gorillas

I’m pretty sure my daughter’s friend thinks I’m whacky. But, maybe not. Maybe she gets me. More likely, she doesn’t think that at all because she’s not thinking about me.

The three of us are in the car. My daughter in the passenger seat; her friend in the back. I dare glance at the youngest of my two children. I take in her face, her features suspended between child and young woman. I note how her eyelashes nearly brush the inside lenses of her sunglasses.

She allows my gaze for a couple seconds before turning to me with a scalding, ‘What?” followed by a withering, “Why are you looking at me?” and finally, “Why are you talking about gorillas?”

I’m talking about gorillas, I tell her, because they’re interesting. Because we have things in common with gorillas; with other people and it pays to take notice sometimes. To think of things other than manicures and makeup and boys; switching to her dad’s house and lunches out with friends. (She’s right. I also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about these same things.)

I’m talking about gorillas because her 13-year-old best friend in the backseat has a younger brother who is autistic and non-verbal. And I want to share a story I heard a couple evenings ago that I think she will appreciate.

As I deliver my preamble, I’m struck by how unpredictable and confusing entry-level teenagers can be. Interactions with them remind me of the time I found a raccoon in my front yard. I was surprised and happy to see this unexpected guest. How lovely and delightful! I remember thinking, “Surely this is some sort of mystical visit. Wait. Maybe it’s a dead relative come to visit in animal form!” I had to get closer.  Continue reading “Sometimes, it’s gorillas”

Coffee cups. The good, the bad & the real.

I’m not sure why I’ve not just thrown it away yet, that offensive holiday coffee mug. Each morning, it mocks me from the back row of the cupboard. All fat and stupid and in poor taste. It offends me.

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I’m going to toss it today.

I’m not a coffee cup snob, just particular. I loved the mug my ex-husband gave me one Valentine’s Day and mourned when it broke. A thick, white mug that proclaimed, ‘I like everything hot,’ punctuated with a sexy little red heart and lipsticked kissy lips.

When Tinder was still permitting Moments (the little photographic peeks into your life you could share with your matches), I posted that picture. A colorfully composed, ‘I’m not trying too hard but look how cool and possibly easy I am’ shot of that mug artfully placed off-center, in front of an equally cool potted plant or two against the backdrop of the graphic black-and-off white, indoor-outdoor Greek key rug on my sunroom floor. – Keep reading!

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